


A Tad Blakk with a Twist

by BaaingTree



Category: Slugterra
Genre: Chronic Illness, Friendship, Gen, Loyalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:34:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23250052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BaaingTree/pseuds/BaaingTree
Summary: For Loki, Twist would do and be anything.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	A Tad Blakk with a Twist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nevanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/gifts).



> Starring chronically ill Loki! The show never explains why he seems to be mostly okay while ghouled, in stark contrast to the rest of the slugs, and how Twist is apparently willing to ghoul his slug even though they're very close. So here you go.
> 
> This is a gift/barter for Nevanna, who mended some of my shirts!

For Loki, Twist would do and be anything.

It’d been just them for as long as he cared to remember, surviving the mean tunnels of SlugTerra, and Twist knew without a doubt that he would’ve been dead without his little slug. Not just because of Loki’s illusions—though they’d saved his hide more times than he could count—but because of Loki’s heart. A boy couldn’t have asked for a better, braver, smarter slug.

Many disagreed with him on that front. Thugglet slugs like Loki were supposed to be pranksters, tricksters, full of energy. Conventional wisdom went that you couldn’t turn your back on them or they’d be halfway to disaster.

But Loki wasn’t like that. Loki had never been like that.

Twist never did find out what the problem was—if anyone asked, he just said that Loki was sick, or having a bad day. But Loki was sad usually, and tired always. Illusions took a lot out of him, and one big one would exhaust him for the rest of the day.

Whatever it was, Loki’s illness meant that no other duelist would take him. And people who saw Loki on a bad day didn’t understand what Twist saw in him.

“He’s a flopper,” they’d laugh. “Get a better slug.”

But there was no better slug, as far as Twist was concerned. Not just because Loki knew how to use his little illusions in just the right way, to make sure they counted. But because when Twist was hungry and cold and afraid, Loki would make silly faces to make him smile. The little slug would do imitations of the cave trolls, molenoids, humans, and slugs they’d seen, and jape about even though he was just as cold, hungry, and afraid as Twist was… and sick besides.

That’s why Loki was the bravest, best slug in SlugTerra. Twist only wished he could return the favor.

“We’ll be rich one day, Loki,” he’d told the little slug once, “and I’ll make you better.”

And Loki had tried to smile, even though it’d been a bad day, and nuzzled into his fingers.

They never became rich. But Twist did make him better.

Twist couldn’t physically disguise himself like Loki. He couldn’t really disappear or melt into the background… but he could do it psychologically, which was almost as good sometimes. If someone had what he needed, he became what they wanted, and he was very, very good at it. Need a hard-luck hero? Boy, golly, he sure could be that! Need a henchman? Sure, boss.

So when Dr. Blakk had come along, sore and smarting from Eli refusing to play into whatever daddy issues ego game the old man was trying to play, Twist had seen an opportunity. Dr. Blakk was smart… but that made him an easy mark, because he assumed he was too smart to be fooled. And deception wasn’t about smarts, exactly. It was about knowing what someone wanted, really wanted.

And Dr. Blakk really wanted a surrogate son/apprentice/ego prop.

So Twist became what Dr. Blakk wanted. It wasn’t hard; a lot of adults had wanted him to be the kid in their heads, so he had a lot of practice, and Dr. Blakk had a strong personality, easy to mirror and copy. Plus, he was motivated—Dr. Blakk was loaded, and could be lavish with his money. Blakk could easily supply a warm, luxurious bed, reliable delicious meals, access to the SlugTerran Express…

…And a cure for Loki, it turned out.

Twist hadn’t predicted that part. Sure, he’d started noticing some of the ghouls around, but he hadn’t known where they came from. But while on the welcome tour of Dr. Blakk’s headquarters, he saw loads of them in tanks, twitching, barking, dark-eyed and vacant-faced.

Blakk caught him looking.

“My ghouls. Do you like them?”

“You sound proud of them.”

Dr. Blakk smiled unpleasantly. “Stronger slugs, higher vitality. Would you like one?”

Twist didn’t like the idea of having Blakk’s slugs on him, even if they were drugged out of their minds. They might still be lucid enough to snitch, and even if Twist remembered to keep his mouth shut, he couldn’t take the chance everyone else would. People always underestimated slugs, just because they couldn’t talk, and that made them way too chatty.

Dr. Blakk caught his hesitation. “Or, perhaps, you’d rather have your own slugs ghouled? Less training that way.”

That sounded like an even less pleasant idea, but it was becoming obvious by Blakk’s body language that Twist was not going to be able to wriggle out of it without offending him… and oh, Twist did not want to offend him. So he looked to Loki, and Loki had smiled his brave smile and chirped reassuringly. His bad days had been getting worse; he probably didn’t see himself as having much to lose.

“Okay,” Twist said, and hoped he hadn’t made a terrible mistake.

It was the best decision they’d made in years.

For most slugs, ghouling made them hyperaggressive and hair-trigger. For a slug as tired and low-energy as Loki, it made him… okay. Fighting didn’t suck him dry anymore, and he seemed happier. He never flipped out and attacked anyone; on the contrary, the dark water seemed to boost him to the level most slugs took for granted and then some, but leave his higher faculties alone.

Sure, he looked a little different, but he was still the same clownish, cheerful Loki underneath. And that was all that mattered.

So when Dr. Blakk started praising Twist’s “initiative” and giving him oily smiles, Twist had smelled the weather and accepted the apprentice position. Sure boss, whatever you say, boss. It was… unpleasantly simple. A lot of adults happily accepted every conversation turning to themselves, but Blakk was uncommonly easy. Twist tried not to get too cocky—that was how you got yourself killed—but it gave him the creeps, and he was downright relieved when Blakk sent him to infiltrate Eli and the Shane Gang.

That was another simple role to play, he thought—all he had to do was mirror and copy Eli until the guy liked him, and the rest of the gang would follow suit, even that suspicious cave troll. But it proved harder than the Blakk job—perversely, because Eli was not the brightest torch in the caves. He kept trying to get Twist to open up, kept trying to make friendly, and just couldn’t take a hint. His open cluelessness (who raised this guy, mechabeasts?) made him a harder quantity to pin down. He didn’t seem to want Twist to be anything, asides from a decent guy, and Twist hadn’t had to work around that in a while.

And that doc slug gave him the willies. Now he was even happier that Loki kept his smarts while ghouled; otherwise, they’d have been exposed in seconds. As it was, Loki stayed cloaked in non-ghouled illusion and made excuses to avoid touching Doc, and they managed to keep it together long enough to pull the heist.

It was while stealing the dark water that Twist got to thinking: what if he cut out the middle-man? Keep the dark water, keep Loki’s cure… and get away from Dr. Blakk. Twist had always tried to be on the winning side… but he was getting that feeling in his gut that told him that Dr. Blakk was dangerous, even more so than he already knew, and not a safe mark to keep playing. Money or no money, he liked breathing. But then the heist went sideways and Twist was back on Blakk’s side again.

Blakk wasn’t happy, of course, and that just cemented Twist’s revolve to get out of there as soon as he could figure out a way to get the dark water.

“He’s going to serve us for dinner, Loki, I just know it,” he muttered one night. “He looks at me like I’m a rump roast.”

Even with the ghouling, Loki wasn’t smiling. He thought, chittered at Twist.

“No way, buddy,” Twist said, petting the little slug between his horns. “Not till we get your cure. I’m a man of my word.”

Loki chittered, more firmly this time.

“No,” Twist said, and they didn’t talk the rest of the night. He and Loki didn’t fight—they couldn’t afford to—but it was one of the closest times they came to it.

They never got straightforward access to the dark water again. Blakk claimed it was punishment for failure, kept making excuses to get Twist out of there, kept playing power games, and he had what Twist wanted, so Twist became what Blakk wanted. Not for Blakk, never for Blakk, but for Loki. For Loki, Twist would do and be anything.

It was for nothing. 

One night, he woke up to find Loki chittering frantically, pulling on his ears and hair, trying to drag him out of bed.

“What? Where’s the fire?” he asked.

He wasn’t nearly as good at understanding Loki’s words as Loki was at the reverse, but that was okay with a Thugglet. Loki went through a quick hasty pantomime of illusions: Dr. Blakk, the portal to the Darkbane, the Shane Gang.

Everybody underestimated slugs. Everyone especially underestimated ghoul slugs, who normally had all the brains of a mine cart. Loki might not have even needed illusion to find things out.

“No.” Amazingly, all Twist could feel was frustration. “No! That… that stupid—”

Loki tried to drag him for the door, but Twist wouldn’t go.

“No! Do you have any idea how long I’ve spent slathering this guy? How many times I’ve smiled and said yessir while he goes on and on about his tortured childhood? I don’t care if he drags all of SlugTerra into the lava caves, he has what we need!”

Loki just looked at him, and that’s when Twist realized it was over. Dr. Blakk had played them. He had figured out what they wanted, what they needed, and once he’d known that, he had them. Twist had fallen for his own stupid shtick.

And Loki had figured it out ages ago.

Twist put his face in his hands, took a deep breath.

“I’m so sorry, Loki,” he said.

Loki was silent for a moment, then peeped acceptance and got them out of there. They disappeared into the night, hours before everything went wrong. If anyone wondered where Twist and Loki had gone, the explosions and chaos meant nobody cared for long.

Twist and Loki hid in the caves until the dust died down. They would’ve hid down there forever (it was way easier, with Loki well), until Loki unghouled.

Neither of them ever knew why (though the way everyone got ghouled for a bit beforehand gave them a sense that something big was going on, elsewhere), but neither of them were surprised. Where would Blakk’s profits be in a permanent cure? If a healer slug could break it, who knew what else could? But now they needed dark water, fast, and they only knew one place where they could get it.

“Can you hide us long enough to get into Blakk’s lab?” Twist asked.

Normally, the answer would’ve been no. But Twist was hoping that just enough of the ghoul-pep remained in Loki to keep him going.

Loki was droopy and sleepy-eyed, but he chittered bravely.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Twist said, scratching between Loki’s horns. “Nothing lasts forever.”

And they got to work.

It’d been a while since they’d had to work around Loki’s sickness, but old habits died hard, and they made it to the abandoned stronghold well enough.

There was only one problem: it wasn’t abandoned.

Twist was the one who found out. They’d managed to dodge the trip wires and security mechas (still mindlessly going about their business, even with Blakk and his henchmen gone), when they heard an eerie sound echoing through the hall.

Twist froze. Singing? Maybe? He glanced at Loki, huddled in his breast pocket, and the slug looked not just tired, but groggy.

“You okay, little guy?” Twist whispered, and then a snare snagged his ankle and hauled him off the floor.

Twist swore as a siren wailed. That was a new addition to the Blakk security system. He twisted, fought… and found himself suspended upside down from the ceiling, spinning and dizzy, the blood all going down to his head. He was still trying to reorient and get himself free when a hand stopped his swaying.

Twist flinched, ready to find Dr. Blakk or one of his cronies… and found himself instead looking at a boy with a slingshot, a purple-and-gold slug on his shoulder, and Dr. Blakk’s eyes.

No. No way.

“What are you doing here?” the boy said, and wow, his voice even sounded like Dr. Blakk’s.

Twist tried not to gape at him. Was that why Dr. Blakk had been so deep in the market for a son surrogate, why he’d been so greasy about it? Wow. Twist might just survive this. (Especially since he no longer felt Loki in his pocket.)

“What’d he name you?” Twist asked.

The boy squinted at him, clearly puzzled and suspicious, but he said, “Tad.”

Twist couldn’t help himself; he cracked up. “A Tad Blakk! You’re killing me!”

It was settled now. This poor flopper was definitely Dr. Blakk’s son. The best con man in the world wouldn’t have saddled himself with a name that awful.

Tad exchanged rolling eyes with his slug, grabbed one of the wires wrapped around Twist, and spun him until he stopped laughing. “What are you doing here? Haven’t you heard who’s taken over this turf?”

Twist hadn’t, since he’d been living under a rock with Loki, who was hopefully long gone by now. “He’s a rotten dad, right? He was for me.”

Tad paused in mid-spin. “What?”

Twist saw the look in Tad’s eyes, the hurt and betrayal masked by indignation and outrage, and he would’ve bet everything now that he knew what Tad wanted. This kid had come from who-knew-where with who-knew-what to take over Dear Old Dad’s abandoned headquarters, to outdo him and at the same time be him, with all his toys and junk. He was like a cave snake who didn’t realize that biting something was still hanging onto it.

And Twist knew what he had to be. He grinned. “How about you cut me down and I’ll tell you everything about how this place works and what your old man was doing with it?”  
…

Mutual hatred wasn’t the best way to form an alliance. But it was a good start.

Twist didn’t need to say much. He never did. The trick was saying just enough to get the other person talking, to become the blank canvas they vomited all their feelings and hang-ups on, and Tad was what, thirteen? Getting him to spill his guts was a cinch.

“Just ditched when I was five!” Tad was snarling. “Just left me and Mom with nothing but some stupid cryptic letter to decode! I only got Pieper,” he indicated the slug on his shoulder, “because she almost got eaten by a cat!”

Pretending he knew what a cat was, Twist made all the right sympathetic noises and told all the right creepy anecdotes about Blakk—not hard; he had a lot of them—and in the process learned that Blakk was an even bigger creep than he’d ever thought. At least Twist had had a good dad once, a long time ago in that time he preferred not to remember. Tad, though…

There was something else about Tad. The kid was as smart as his old man (and presumably as mean), but he also had a… a cluelessness that seemed totally out of character, and also weirdly familiar. Twist had to explain to him what ghouls were, what dark water was, what megamorphs and molenoids and all the rest of it was. Where had Twist seen that?

Eli. And more pieces came together in a flash.

Twist risked a question. “How’d you get down here from the Burning World anyway?”

Tad blinked at him. “From the what?”

So then Twist had to explain what the Burning World was. But Tad was too clueless to know how big the question was; he gave Twist a funny look, but didn’t hesitate in his answer.

“There’s a series of deep tunnels from… from my world to here. They go for miles; Pieper and I spent years mapping them, since that letter turned out to be massively outdated.” Tad made a sound of contempt and pulled a much-folded, raggedy paper from his pocket. He even did Twist the favor of tossing at him with disgust. “See? Look at it!”

Twist did and tried to hide his astonishment. The map, clearly done laboriously by hand (by Tad) was better than most of the professional ones he’d seen. But he knew what Tad needed him to be, so he rolled his eyes and shook his head with a chuckle. “What a jerk.”

“Exactly. Anyway, if you go long enough, they lead to a drop,” Tad leaned over, stabbed his finger down on the map, “here, way up in the high channels out there.” He waved his other hand vaguely northward.

Even with that, Twist knew what he meant—there was a high part in the vaults not too far from the stronghold, so high that clouds and rain accumulated. You could’ve hidden the whole SlugTerran Express up there in the fog. He wondered if that was why Blakk had set up shop there in the first place.

“It’s a long drop,” Tad continued. “I would’ve broken my neck if Pieper hadn’t transformed falling with me.”

Twist tried to hide his disappointment. Loki could do a lot of things with dark water, but he would never be a flier. “Pieper’s your slug, right? I’ve never seen one like her before.”

Tad just shrugged and said with a smile, “She must be one of a kind, then.”

Pieper looked smug. She’d been silent this whole time, watching Twist with an aloofness that made him wonder whether she was buying anything he was selling. Fooling slugs was harder. Their body language was different, and despite his efforts, he’d never learned much of what they were saying to each other. He didn’t know how to be what they wanted.

Pieper kept looking at him (dubiously, he thought), and Twist felt a prickle in his spine, the one that told him to finish his business and get out of there. Blakk had always treated his slugs like fodder, completely ignored them, and most of them had been vacant ghouls anyway, but Tad seemed to defer to Pieper in a way most people never did to their slugs. (He probably had to, Twist realized; Pieper was the one who knew things down here.) If she gave Tad the feeling that Twist was bad news, Twist suspected that the kid could be just as dangerous as his old man.

Time to get his dark water and go.

As though remembering how he’d met Twist, Tad frowned at him. “What did you say brought you here again, exactly?” Though his voice remained conversational, his hand was slipping to a slingshot down at his side.

There were times when the truth was better than a lie. And Tad had no understanding of this world. So Twist said, “I want to get Loki some dark water. And then I want to get out of here.” A thought struck him. “You lived up there. Is the Burning World worth going to?”

Tad blinked. He exchanged glances with his slug, and Twist realized that this could work out beautifully. Tad would get a manual to the hideout and get rid of the one guy who knew just how ignorant he was; Loki would get his cure and Twist would be in the one place that neither Blakk nor Eli Shane would ever think to look for him. Everyone could win.

Tad smiled and steepled his fingers. “I think that could be arranged.”

Twist never did become rich. But he did make Loki better.


End file.
